Pages

Tuesday, 15 October 2013

Review of My Memories of a Future Life by Roz Morris

Reviewed by Susan Price

Roz Morris

Age-range: Adult, Young Adult.

I have had to
wrestle with monsters of professional jealousy to review this book. It is SO good.

Even the premise
is one of those striking ideas that seems so beautiful and right, even obvious,
but that you know you would never have thought of yourself: - if, by hypnosis,
you can be regressed into a past life, could you be progressed to a future
life? My immediate response was: Wish I’d
thought of that! But I didn’t. Roz Morris did.

It’s far more
than a great idea. From the very first
page, the prose is a sheer pleasure to read.
It’s a first-person narration by Carol Lear, and her voice is alive,
witty, perceptive, expressive. I laughed
aloud several times at her dry, neat nailing of a situation or person.

Carol is a
classical pianist, passionate about her instrument and music, raging against
the limitations placed on her by repetitive strain injury (the pain of which is
so well described, it made my hands ache.)

She’s frustrated
because her pain doesn’t respond to treatment.
A close friend, suffering from panic attacks, is in a similar situation –
but his problems seem to be solved when he undergoes a past life regression.
The unresolved trauma of his previous life has spilled over into his present
life, causing his attacks; and only when he faces what happened in his previous
existence can his panics be controlled. Carol
is so desperate to be free of pain and to play again that, although sceptical,
she is drawn to the idea of other lives – and, indeed, to the hypnotist, the
elusive, attractive Gene Winter.

Carol
experiences not a past life, but a future one.
If the trauma of the life you’re living is shaping the life of an
unknown stranger in a future you can’t recognise, what should you do?

It’s not a book
easily categorised. Should I call it a
literary novel? Science Fiction?
Romance? You could make a case for
including it in any one of those genres though, like all original books, it refuses to sit easily in any one of them.

While reading, I
several times thought I could predict the ending. I was always wrong. But the ending, when I reluctantly reached
it, was beautiful, thoughtful, and right.
It brought a realisation that the novel had never been about what I
thought it had been about, and made me want to read it again, so I could enjoy
the skill with which it had all been handled.

It isn’t about
attacking and solving problems. It’s
about, I think, the way we cause our own problems, but hide from them, preferring
to fall over them and hurt ourselves again
and again, rather than see those problems clearly, or – that thing we dread -
changing.

It’s about
resolution, about picking ourselves up, sorting ourselves out, and going
on. Not, perhaps, solving the problem –
which may be insoluble – but doing that very hard thing, changing, and walking
away, leaving old things behind. Not,
after all, memories of a future life, but – future life.